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Accused British 'Flash Crash' Stock Trader To Be Extradited To The US (zerohedge.com)
Slashdot reader whoever57 writes: Navinder Sarao has lost his appeal and is set to be extradited to the USA, where he faces charges with a possible maximum sentence of 380 years. He is accused of causing the "flash crash" in 2010, when the Dow Jones index dropped by 1000 points.
He ran his trading from his bedroom in his parents' house and it is claimed that he made more than 30 million pounds (approximately $40 million) in five years. His parents had no idea what he was doing, nor the scale of his income. He is accused of placing trades that he never intended to fill, so, to this naive person, it's hard to distinguish what he did from the large high-speed trading firms.
"Lawyers for Mr Sarao tried to argue that the U.S. crime of spoofing had no equivalent under English law, meaning he could not be sent for trial overseas," reports The Telegraph, adding that he's already spent four months in jail because he didn't have enough money to post his own bail.
He ran his trading from his bedroom in his parents' house and it is claimed that he made more than 30 million pounds (approximately $40 million) in five years. His parents had no idea what he was doing, nor the scale of his income. He is accused of placing trades that he never intended to fill, so, to this naive person, it's hard to distinguish what he did from the large high-speed trading firms.
"Lawyers for Mr Sarao tried to argue that the U.S. crime of spoofing had no equivalent under English law, meaning he could not be sent for trial overseas," reports The Telegraph, adding that he's already spent four months in jail because he didn't have enough money to post his own bail.
"a possible maximum sentence of 380 years."
You don't even get that for murder
The US froze his assets. That's why he couldn't post bail.
There is no such thing in England as having to post bail. You can be released on bail with bail conditions, but you don't have to pay anything, because that idea is fucking stupid and just favours the rich innocent over the poor innocent (and everyone is innocent at this stage), making justice non-blind. Everything about this summary doesn't fit together.
When the shit hits the fan, everybody runs to hide behind the US militarily, and everybody, including enemies, runs to hide their money in safe US dollars.
Complaints are akin to your kids being embarrassed you joked with the supermarket cashier.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So he abused a flaw in the cheating bastards who are doing high frequency trading. Like finding a flaw in the aimbots the cheaters are using in an FPS game and using it to get kills. And they want to jail him for 380 years ("ban him from life") for that.
The crime is making orders with the intent to cancel before being fulfilled. ... The intent to cancel, in order to create a false market perception, is the crime. ... a pattern of cancelled-while-unfulfilled orders, combined with other orders that profit from the market perception that the unfulfilled orders create, is a very clear establishment of such intent.
Is it also an establishment of intent if you (as a large financial firm) deploy, in actual trading on real markets with real money, an algorithm that exhibits such behavior? If, in addition, you KEEP it deployed even after its behavior is noticed and complained about in public media of the sort likely to be read by trading professionals?
And it is something that the traders at Goldman Sachs can make a fortune without doing.
But it's something that they can make a BIGGER fortune by DOING. And something that can count toward the rise of individuals and groups through the corporate ladder and pay scale.
While don't recall if G.S. was specifically one of the organizations complained about (and am not going to spend the time right now digging through archives to check), I DO recall com"plaints about high-speed traders taking advantage of the cancellation features of the online market engines in just this way.
One of the advantages of shaving milliseconds off the communication delays and algorithms that was specifically mentioned (once the pattern was observed) was the ability to send an order and a cancellation in rapid enough succession that it could not be pounced on (and thus didn't really risk money), sending price signals that tricked competing, slightly less high-speed or well-tuned, algorithms into making other bad trades from which their operators lost and the perpetrators gained.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It does, except when the US tells it not to.
See also: Gary McKinnon, Barclays Five.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."